Multicultural Voices for Change

Where: NYPL Mulberry St. Library

10 Jersey Street

(between Prince and East Houston, off of Lafayette)

R, B, D, F trains nearby R to Prince  B, D, F to Broadway-Lafayette

When: Saturday, September 28  2:00-4:00 p.m.

Featuring:

Born in Volos, Greece, Nicos Alexiou came to the United States in the mid-1980s and has taught Sociology at Queens College since 1989 where he received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Alexiou has published five poetry collections, and many of which have been appeared in Greek and American journals and anthologies. His latest bi-lingual collection, The Silver Sphinx (Melani, Athens, Greece) will be published later this year. He is a founder of the the Hellenic American Project, the first Archive/Immigration Library/and Museum and is a member of the Greek American Poets Guild, and the Greek Authors Association, in Greece.

 Luigi Bonaffini has translated books by Dino Campana, Mario Luzi, Vittorio Sereni, Attilio Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini and many others. He has edited five trilingual anthologies of dialect poetry and has translated widely from various Italian dialects. He is the editor of the Journal of Italian Translation. He is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York where he met Gil Fagiani whose selected works he has translated pending publication.

Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila; Katonah, New York; Cairo, Egypt; and Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason), including the limited edition pamphlet/cassette Ur’lyeh/ Aklopolis (Texte und Tone) and the booklet/cassette Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours (Nion Editions/Temporary Tapes). A featured artist in Greater NY 2015 and Queens International 2018: Volumes, he recently completed OBB, a weird postcolonial techno dreampop comics poem begun in 2005 that also includes illustrations by Alex Tarampi and Ernest Concepcion.

Olena Jennings is the author of Songs from an Apartment and Memory Project (Underground Books 2017 and 2018.)   Her translation in collaboration with the author Iryna Shuvalova of the poetry collection Pray to the Empty Wells will be released in fall 2019 by Lost Horse Press. Jennings will present her work in English and Ukrainian at the Publishers Forum in Lviv in western Ukraine in September. She is a 2018 recipient of a New Work Grant from the Queens Council of the Arts, NY and curates the Poets of Queens Reading series at Book Culture in Long Island City.

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate 2015-2018 and the first Italian American to be so named. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize, her collections include Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), and two chapbooks, Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press), and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). A charter member of the online poetry circle brevitas, she also co-curates the Italian American Writers Association readings, contributes to USA TODAY, The Jerusalem Post  and the bilingual, La Voce di New York. 

 Raquel I. Penzo, is a writer, editor, and literary event curator from Brooklyn. She earned her MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and currently works as a senior copywriter at Brooklyn Public Library. Her poems were included in the AfroLatinx poetry anthology, ¡Manteca!

Claudia Serea’s poems and translations have appeared in Field, New Letters, Gravel, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and elsewhere. She has published five poetry collections, most recently Twoxism, a poetry-photography collaboration with Maria Haro (8th House Publishing, 2018). Serea co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House Publishing, 2011) for which she received a grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute. She also translated from the Romanian Adina Dabija’s Beautybeast (Northshore Press, 2012). Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month.